Reznor Rip-offs

[sinmantyx]

I adore NIN...but the other day I was watching THX 1138; and when THX 1138 is watching his holographic programs....all the sudden I realized that the sound of one of the citizens being beaten by a police officer happen to be the beginning of a NIN song. (Or am I crazy!)

After being amazed at "You're so vain, you probably think this song..." was written by Carly Simon and the recent Phee question of the week.....I'm wondering what else Trent has "borrowed" and not told us about.

I'm all for borrowing...but it would be nice to know where I should give credit when it is due. I wonder if he even asks? He must! Mustn't he?

[Troy Spiral (13)]

I'm trying hard to remember, but i think i've failed. I do distinctly remember hearing (something) and saying to myself "holy crap that's where that NIN song sound came from?!

Usually doesn't occur to me to think about if they had permission for use of XYZ sample beforehand, but back in ancient history i did some research on copywrite infringement and such. (Due to a comic artist i liked being sued by Marvel for his satire of one of their characters) It seemed all very wishy-washy as to what was considered "fair use" and what was "infringement". "One "instance" is satire, reccuring instances are "infringment"" is one very open-to-interpritation quote i remember. Then on top of that was the trouble you would have to go through to actually put any iron in the glove to actually get a infringement rights suit to go anywhere... zzzz

I'm wondering what else Trent has "borrowed" and not told us about.

Would be interesting to see a listed breakdown somewhere of various samples and such he's used and their sources.

[Ginevra]

Last I knew, and it's been some years and I don't know if it goes for individual words and phrases, but I do remember that the courts decided that a person could sample exactly 16 notes of someone else's work without being considered infringing.

[Fierce Critter]

Check out point #3 on this page for your answer: http://www.hauntedink.com/nin/ninnotes.html

And the following is excerpted from http://nothing.nin.net/int10.html

Josh: What are your thoughts on sampling, within the definition of copyright laws and the restrictions therein?

Trent: I think that sound is sound. If somebody sampled a bit of something in an album of mine, that's cool. I don't give a shit about that. I think it's interesting how rap groups piece together things into new sounds. I'm into that. I do think that it's totally out of control now. Asshole major label lawyers are getting in on it, and realizing they can make money by ripping people off. If M.C. Hammer looped "Head Like a Hole" and did a rap over it, it'd piss me off, and I think I should be compensated because it's my song. I think at a certain point there should be some degree of compen- sation. When it's at *that* level. Like some of these assholes: Vanilla Ice, where it's another whole song with someone talking over it. Or Dr. Dre singing Funkadelic. I've used a lot of samples, but I don't tell anyone where I got them. It's not identifiable. I'm not just looping someone else's music. I'm more interested in textures than the novelty off who or what I've appropriated.

Josh: You bury your samples. If they were taken from a song, I would never be able to recognize it.

Trent: I just produced another band, Marilyn Manson, from my label, and they have a bunch of weird obscure samples, like Charles Nelson Reilly from Lidsville, some bizarre little excerpt from one sentence and the lawyers say "Did you get permission to use that?" This is just one of fifty things on the record.

Josh: Where do you draw the line?

Trent: Well, labels now are so afraid to put a record out. There are people at major labels whose job is just to clear samples, to listen for samples and start the whole thing up. So we made a list of all the different samples that were on this thing, from that song that goes (deep voice) "I bring you fire." You know which one I'm talking about, he's got makeup on. I don't remember the name of it. Just "I bring y..." Not even that much, and it's tuned down, but everyone was terrified. Some album came out, it might have been De La Soul, I forget which rap group. They didn't clear a couple samples and got sued like a motherfucker. They had to recall the album, it cost the label millions. So everyone's terrified now. We had to call Charles Nelson Reilly's peole to see if it was okay: "Yeah, but he'd like to have five hundred dollars for that sample." It's like, "Fuck you!" You know? You would never even know that existed.

...

KB: What were some of the things that you sampled?

TR: My assistant, Chris Vrenna, probably went through 3,000 movies listening to them without watching them. Not to find the cliche spoken dialog sample, but just to hear sounds. He'd through them on DAT, then I'd listen to them -- I didn't know where they came from -- and I'd cut 'em up into little segments and process them further through Turbosynth or whatever. We compiled almost ten optical disks of "things" like that. We'd do a new song: "Okay, what's the mood?" "It's Grim." so we'd put up a bank, find a sound, set it aside.

Another thing I did was ... a guy came to tune our studio and he had one of those real-time frequency/noise-generator things. So I sampled it. I think there's something strangeley musical about noise. If you take a high frequency and pitch it way down to where it's aliasing, you've got a pretty cool thing. You layer that in the mix, and suddenly it becomes thicker, even though sometimes you can't necessarily hear it. A song like "Mr. Self Destruct", obviously you're going to hear it, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner running through the whole thing. But a lot of times it just thickens things up without being noticed as, "Oh he's just layering some noise in there."

If you go to this page: http://voyagerradio.blogspot.com/2003_07_0...io_archive.html and do a "find in window" search on the word "sampled", it'll take you to an interesting discussion of some sampling he might have done on "Pretty Hate Machine" involving sounds from the Disney movie "Tron".

I'm sure there's more out there, but I'm ready to move my little searching self onto something else. :grin:

[Vater Araignee]

Last I knew, and it's been some years and I don't know if it goes for individual words and phrases, but I do remember that the courts decided that a person could sample exactly 16 notes of someone else's work without being considered infringing.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

16 notes?!?!?!?! DAM but thats a lot!!!

Way to much. I think only abou 1/2 that is fair

[sinmantyx]

Thanks for the link. I knew it was the same.

btw...#3 completely messes up what the scene is about. The explanation makes it sound like it has to do with race or sex or something. THEY ARE NOT NAKED...neither of them are naked. One is wearing the standard black cop uniform and the other is wearing the standard white citizen uniform.

It is a robot police man beating a human being who is balled up in a fetal position on the floor. He is being beaten with a baton. It was basically the holographic imager's version of a public flogging. The entertainment did have something to do with race...as every citizen was white, but every entertainer on the imager was black. Therefor, you could tell that the man being beaten was not an actor in a TV show, because he was white.

The rythmic pattern at the beginning of "self destruct" is unchanged from the sounds in the movie. The idea is that the man is being beaten faster; but in a regular rythmic way reminding you that he is being beaten by a MACHINE. (I was watching the new directors cut however, it would be hilarious to find out that George Lucas reverse-sampled Trent Reznor for the directors cut...that would so make my day.)

[sinmantyx]

16 notes?!?!?!?! DAM but thats a lot!!!

Way to much. I think only abou 1/2 that is fair

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

hahaha....define "note"....so, I guess I should have gone into intellectual property law.

[Daniel]

"Last I knew, and it's been some years and I don't know if it goes for individual words and phrases, but I do remember that the courts decided that a person could sample exactly 16 notes of someone else's work without being considered infringing."

Actually, recent court decisions have declared any use of sampling as illegal, even if the sample is unrecognizable.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5964507

[sinmantyx]

"Last I knew, and it's been some years and I don't know if it goes for individual words and phrases, but I do remember that the courts decided that a person could sample exactly 16 notes of someone else's work without being considered infringing."

Actually, recent court decisions have declared any use of sampling as illegal, even if the sample is unrecognizable.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5964507

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting.

I have a peice that includes 2 musical "samples" that are very recognizeable. One is a rap song that I have no idea who wrote (maybe someone can help me) where the vocalists says "black man in a white world" over and over again. The other is from my friend's band "Sons of Posidon" and is just a bit of a guitar riff. Thing is, I got the sounds from a secret recording of me walking around downtown Fargo...and is the background of an original poem my friend wrote about Fargo.

The rap song was coming from a car cuising downtown and the guitar riff was from *outside* the building of where my friend's band was playing.

hehehehe......that ought to make some judge pull their hair out.